Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]

I mean, I’m aromantic and have a partner. It’s not like I don’t love them, I do, intensely. I simply don’t understand what the difference is between romantic and platonic love.

Like, what’s different about the love you have for a romantic partner than the love you have for a friend? Is it simply the addition of being sexually attracted to someone? So romantic love is friendship plus sexual attraction? What happens when the sexual attraction fades? Do you stop romantically loving your partner? Do you then break up because you’re no longer sexually attracted to them? I just don’t get it, frankly.

Sexual attraction for me is so, so fickle, it comes and goes and never stays. If I tried to build partner relationships on sexual attraction, well, I’d never stick with one partner for long, I’d be breaking up with people constantly, and that sounds like a miserable way to live. Especially since I’ve found a person I get along great with, we have similar long-term goals, senses of humor that mesh great, they’re everything I want in a life partner. I really don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to be married to this person, we’ve built our life together, why would I throw that away just because I don’t really “get” romantic love?

I read the title and was like, “oh, this is a very clever and funny vegan circlejerk type satire post, good stuff”.

Then I clicked the link and realized it’s real, and laughed even harder. It’s so funny on so many levels, from the zoo not realizing (or not caring) that the phrase “unwanted pets” is going to majorly rustle carnist feathers, to the backlash the zoo is going to get from people who themselves happily eat animal corpses, to the people who are mad at the zoo for this and not because zoos are horrendous for the animals who live in them, to the zoo making sure to talk at length about how painlessly all the donated animals will be euthanized.

Very good stuff!

Yeah, I already know you and your brother think intersex people are deformed and should be forced to undergo (entirely unnecessary, usually very invasive) “treatments” to better conform to your ideals. I’m saying that’s a fucking bigoted point of view and you and your brother should change your opinions of intersex people.

Please either engage with the arguments in my first comment in this thread or stop commenting. Repeating some variation of “there are two sexes and everyone who can’t be easily classified as one or the other is deformed and should be ignored” is just not good enough. And that seems to be all you and your brother are capable of doing.

I didn’t ban anyone, I’m not a mod or admin.

What I’ve been saying is simply that the statement “mammals have two sexes” is over simplified to the point of being wrong! Not only that, but this incorrect idea, that every human can be easily classified as belonging to one of two distinct, unchangeable sexes has tangible negative effects on real people. I probably should have called Kirby intersex-phobic rather than transphobic, as that’s more accurate, but I stand by saying he has some bigoted ideas and needs to do some self-reflection.

Through a weird quirk of federation, the entire exchange has been preserved on Hexbear, here

You were banned for very good reason.

I’m happy to keep talking to you, to help you understand how you’re wrong here, but you’re going to have to do some work too, because I can explain until I’m blue in the face, but if you’re not listening, then all the explanation in the world won’t help.

You need to start by rereading my first comment in the thread, the long one, and actually trying to understand what I’m saying, rather than brushing it all off. If you believe I’m “denying reality”, you need to point to specific claims in that comment and tell me why you think they’re false. Just repeating some version of “sex is straightforward, there are two of them, and people who can’t be easily classified as one of the two are deformed and should be ignored” is absolutely not good enough.

Back in topic, would you be that negative if AI’s issues were addressed and solved? Because they will be addressed and solved. It’s a basic business need to minimise costs (energy, water) and solve legal disputes (copyright).

The issues with LLMs will never be solved. The environmental damage and copyright issues will persist as long as capitalism does. And those aren’t even my main issues. These fucking things are marketed as thinking machines that can reason and help people work through problems, but they are fundamentally incapable of that. They hallucinate and spout nonsense and it’s not a matter of “oh, just train them better, they’ll eventually be worth using”, there are fundamental mathematical reasons that these things spout so much nonsense, and no amount of high quality training data will ever fix it.

So you think that the lack of disgust over cell phones (or smartphones, I’m happy to talk about them instead, since that’s what you meant) had more to do with the lack of social media than anything inherent in the technology. I don’t know that I agree, really. It’s possible, I suppose, but I don’t really use social media now (except posting on Hexbear), and I would say my disgust with LLMs has more to do with my understanding of the mathematics behind them and my experiences using them, rather than listening to what other people are saying about them.

At this rate of adoption, in a few years it will be as normal as having a mobile phone (they weren’t around only 20 years ago)

First, mobile phones were extremely common in 2005 (20 years ago), even I had one, and I was literally a child.

Second, and this is the part I’m actually curious about: I wonder if there were people in the 80s and 90s (when mobile phones were actually rare, but becoming more common) who felt the same pure, visceral disgust for them that I feel for LLMs. I sort of suspect not, but I could be wrong, and I’d be curious to read anti-cell phone writing from that era, to see what people were worried about and whether those worries are in any way the same as the current worries I (and many others) have about LLMs.

Edit: Sweet! Kirby got banned from lemmygrad for their obvious bigotry, making this comment entirely pointless, you love to see it, hell yeah!

Go back and read my first comment in the thread, the long one, and tell me which bits of it are “denying reality”.

Ok, thanks, this clears up your position!

You’re extremely fucking transphobic and need to work on not being like that.

Ok, so being born with ambiguous genitalia is a deformity in your mind? Do you think that infants born with ambiguous genitalia should undergo surgery to make their genitalia fit cisnormative ideals?

And I have to ask, just so we’re extremely clear, what do you, you personally, mean by “sex”? How do you determine who is male and who is female? What criteria are you using to sort people into these two categories?

So you’re saying gametes determine sex and anyone who doesn’t produce gametes has no sex. Cool. That’s fine, and a reasonable way to define “sex”, if we must do so.

Your definition of sex isn’t a common one, most people who care to try and define sex don’t like saying that people can have no sex at all, which is what you’re saying.

I clearly said in my comment that every human produces at most one of two possible types of gamete, so I don’t know why you spent so many sentences talking about a hypothetical third gamete, I’m well aware there’s no such thing.

I’m also going to emphasize, once again, that genitals don’t always match gametes and, furthermore, don’t always fit cleanly into either penis or vulva, lots of people are born with ambiguous genitalia.

the stuff we all have between legs, that definitely defines sex.

Ok, but like, it doesn’t. See this comment I made yesterday.

Edit: I’m actually going to copy the comment here, so no one has to click on a link to read it:

What do we mean by “sex”?

Do we mean chromosomes? If so, there aren’t two sexes, there are a whole bunch, look at the list on this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_chromosome_anomalies

Do we mean genitals? If so, again, there aren’t two distinct sexes, instead it’s more of a spectrum between “this is obviously a penis” and “this is obviously a vulva”. In fact, infants with genitals that can’t be neatly classified as a penis or a vulva frequently have surgery forced upon them and these (completely unnecessary) surgeries cause all sorts of issues later in life.

Do we mean hormonal profile? Again, it’s not as straightforward as testosterone = male, estrogen = female. The endocrine system is wildly complicated and the ratios of sex hormones people have can vary wildly. A person’s hormonal profile is also extremely changeable, which is something shitty right-wingers don’t want “biological sex” to be.

Do we mean size of gametes? This is the only option that even remotely makes sense, because it is true that in humans there are only two kinds of gametes, small gametes (sperm) and large gametes (eggs). Furthermore, there has never been a case of a human who produces both eggs and sperm, every human produces at most one of the two. But lots of people are completely infertile, producing no gametes. So if by “sex” we mean the size of gametes someone produces, then there are a whole lot of people who are sexless because they produce no gametes.

But ok, size of gamete produced almost works as a definition of “sex”. So maybe we could look at the gonads in people who don’t produce gametes and make a determination of their sex that way. Well, it turns out that doesn’t work either, because there are people with both ovarian tissue and testicular tissue, and sometimes these tissues are even mixed together in the same organ (called “streak gonads”).

So what are we left with? Nothing. There’s nothing to “sex”, it’s a meaningless term. Listen to any shitty right-winger try and define “biological sex” and you’ll hear them eventually say something like “a male is someone whose reproductive system is geared towards producing sperm”. But what does that mean? Fuck all, I’d say. What shitty right-wingers mean is “a female is someone who I think is a woman”. They’re all of them, to a person, talking about gender every time they say “biological sex”. They’ll deny it, but ask them about intersex people, or people with ambiguous genitalia or streak gonads, and you’ll get nonsense in response.

I’ve whiled away many a hilarious hour reading terfs (on ovarit, before it shutdown) arguing about which particular intersex people count as women. They never agree, there is no “party line”, it’s all vibes and always has been.

Well see, here you have good proof that chatGPT isn’t actually “the best knowledge retrieving tool at the moment”. ChatGPT (and every other LLM) suuuucks at complicated math, because these text extruders don’t reason. Seriously, try out some more complicated math problems. I think you’ll find chatGPT gets most of them wrong, and in infuriating ways that make very little sense.

I don’t disagree that we need better math instruction for students. I’ve been saying this since I was a student. But using chatGPT being horrible at math as evidence of this is, well, ridiculous, frankly. ChatGPT’s performance isn’t based on how well your average high schooler understands something, and I don’t know why you’re trying to tie those two very different things together.

It’s pretty annoying to read the mailing list, I agree. There’s a very small hyperlink that says “next” that’s right below the message body. If you click that, you can read the next message in the chain. Keep doing that until you get to the end, and yeah, it looks like this was resolved and wasn’t actually malicious.

I’m going to try to be respectful and reasonable here. If I fail at that, I’m truly sorry, I’m really trying.

I think you and I want different things from the fediverse. I like that my instance (Hexbear) is widely defederated. It’s a lovely little refuge from the reactionary political opinions I can’t help but hear in my day to day life living in America.

I also can’t agree with you that political disagreements aren’t reason for defederation. To go for an extreme example first, being an avowed neo-nazi is a political choice, and I’d kick an avowed neo-nazi out of any space I had the power to kick them out of.

For other examples, we can look at things that have already happened in the fediverse, such as feddit .uk deciding that posting transphobia is actually fine and dandy, because the laws in the UK are such that transphobic speech is very much allowed, or we can look at the recent kerfuffle surrounding feddit .org, wherein feddit .org decided that due to laws in Germany, criticism of Israel can’t be as full-throated as it really should be. These examples are both cases where local politics affect how things are moderated, or, at least, local politics are being used as an excuse for moderation decisions. And I think these moderation decisions (allowing transphobia in the first case, censoring criticism of Israel in the second) are worth defederating over. If transphobia doesn’t get banned and removed on sight, then how can trans people feel safe and included in a space? And similarly, if Israel’s horrific genocide is downplayed in a space, that space becomes less friendly for Palestinians and other Arab and Muslim people.

I don’t need or want political plurality in this online space, I want a brief refuge from the terrible politics surrounding me. This isn’t me sticking my head in the sand to ignore the awful shit happening around me, I see all that, I talk to people who believe in the American status quo because believe it or not, most Americans aren’t communists. I love that here on this corner of Lemmy I can be openly communist and talk to other open communists about all kinds of things. It’s really nice, actually, and that would be lost if we were federated with the anti-communist shitholes like .world. Not to mention the transphobia. Holy shit, every time I accidentally end up outside my lovely little Lemmy bubble it’s just transphobia as far as the eye can see. So I’m glad we at Hexbear are widely defederated, I really don’t need to see the liberal nonsense and transphobia that are so inescapable in my real life.

I didn’t know about this! I already use rofi for a few different things, so I’m going to get rofi-calc working too, it’ll fit perfectly into my workflow. Thanks!

Sounds like you’ve gotten good answers about your formatting question. For the steam proton question, the answer is that yes, steam installs it automatically. You might have to mess with the proton version for specific games, so check https://www.protondb.com/ for your game if it doesn’t work immediately.

Congrats on trying out Linux! I hope you enjoy it! I’ve never used Mint myself (I don’t like ubuntu-type package management), nor the Cinnamon desktop (although I’ve heard good things), but that’s part of the beauty of linux, there’s so much to try! Mint is definitely a good starter distro, but if you find you enjoy messing around with it, you might consider a bit of distro-hopping.